On a side note, do you know what causes that tremendous lag when I pass the mouse over the login on WinXP? It happens on three different boxes, and is annoying as hell :/ With higher resolution login screens it is horrendous, even though the machines themselves are more then capable.

If you do not have graphics card drivers installed, it will do this. Keep in mind that the "drivers" that come WITH Windows XP should be updated if you haven't done so already. This is because they handle the GUI acceleration very poorly and suffer the same problem as you mentioned.

If you do have newer drivers installed, then your card may not support GUI alpha blending properly. This relies off of the CPU instead of the graphics card, and even a very fast CPU cannot do this well.

If installing new drivers does not work, then the solution is to turn off the fade effect. There is not a specific option to do this, rather you'll have to disable one of the 4 visual effects located in Start/Control Panel/System/Advanced/Performance/Visual Effects.

Disable one of the top 4 and if you pick the right one, you will no longer see the fading effect when choosing a user. I'm not sure which one is the right one, but using trial and error you should be able to find it. You may just want to disable all 4 of the top ones since all of those effects are probably slow on your computer (judging from your difficulty with the login screen).

I have a very decent set of drivers installed for my card, works wonders in other things.

The first four effects in visual effects were already disabled, however I don't see how those would effect them (animate windows, fade/slide menus, fade/slide tooltips, fade out menus), but speaking of Alpha Blending, I don't think my video card supports that at all (it's an older 16mb voodoo banshee, which although was awesome in some situations is very picky) so I guess I'll just deal with it.